Letter From Toronto: Descendants Overloaded with Calculation; Take Shelter Overloaded with Michael Shannon

Casting Michael Shannon as a potential psychotic is a bit like crowing over the discovery that water is wet. And sure enough, in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter, showing here in Toronto after earlier fest-circuit stops at Sundance and Cannes, Shannon gets his chance to go all bug-eyed and thin-lipped, to sweat through his clothes, to go ballistic on the neighbors, warning them that a big storm is coming and it's going to wipe them out if they don't get ready.

Shannon's character has been having apocalyptic visions: Birds arrange themselves strange formations in the sky; yellow rain falls from above, as if God were expressing his dissatisfaction with mankind by taking one giant whiz all over the heartland. Is all of this really happening? Or is Shannon's character, a hardworking Midwesterner, suffering the early stages of paranoid schizophrenia? Wouldn't you like to know! His wife, played by Jessica Chastain, would, too. She doesn't quite know what to make of his behavior -- her husband has taken out a massive loan to spiff up the family's tornado shelter in preparation for the big biblical showdown, and she's none too happy about that, considering the couple's young daughter (Tova Stewart), who is deaf, has some upcoming heavy-duty medical expenses.

The first third or so of Take Shelter is suitably unsettling. Nichols, director of the 2007 Shotgun Stories, knows how to use the landscape (and CGI-enhanced weather) to build a sense of dread: The family's modest house, somewhere out in rural Ohio, ought to be cozy and safe, but it seems isolated and exposed, a sitting target in an expanse of brownish grass and grayish sky.

But how you'll ultimately feel about Take Shelter depends a lot on your tolerance for Shannon's pop-eyed nutcase routine. I feel I've seen it too many times before, and once, even just his turn in William Friedkin's Bug, would have been more than enough. Jessica Chastain, in one of her 1,001 movie roles this year, is far more restrained and more moving: She plays a character whose common sense is commingled with fear -- and, as it turns out, that's probably the combination she needs to survive. Her face, whether she's expressing wonder or anxiety, is the movie's most reliable weather report.

Read more of Stephanie Zacharek's 2011 Toronto International Film Festival coverage here.

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